very said:
Hi Malke,
promise I've not posted anything here before but I am very confused and
this seemed to be on the right subject.
I have a Sony Vaio (VGN FZ21E) which seems like a lovely machine but
having had enough of Vista (home premium) i thought I'd try an iMac for
a home computer (OS X ver 10.5.5). I can't get the two to talk to each
other. I've tried making the changes to the registry suggested, I've
set the accounts to the same names (at least I think I have) but no
success. The Mac seems to be able to see the Sony but not the other way
round.
All I can do is give you the instructions for the Windows side once again.
It sounds like the Mac is set up fine. Go through them carefully. You're
missing something on the Vista machine, probably a misconfigured firewall
and/or missing user accounts/passwords. You cannot "set the accounts to the
same names" by simply changing the names in the User Accounts applet in
Windows. You need to create actual user accounts that match and have
passwords.
Problems sharing files between computers on a network are generally caused
by 1) a misconfigured firewall or overlooked firewall (including a stateful
firewall in a VPN); or 2) inadvertently running two firewalls such as the
built-in Windows Firewall and a third-party firewall; and/or 3) not having
identical user accounts and passwords on all Workgroup machines; 4) trying
to create shares where the operating system does not permit it.
A. Configure firewalls on all machines to allow the Local Area Network (LAN)
traffic as trusted. With Windows Firewall, this means allowing File/Printer
Sharing on the Exceptions tab. Normally running the Network Setup Wizard on
XP will take care of this for those machines.The only "gotcha" is that this
will turn on the XPSP2 Windows Firewall. If you aren't running a
third-party firewall or have an antivirus/security program with its own
firewall component, then you're fine. With third-party firewalls, I
usually configure the LAN allowance with an IP range. Ex. would be
192.168.1.0-192.168.1.254. Obviously you would substitute your correct
subnet. Refer to any third party security program's Help or user forums for
how to properly configure its firewall. Do not run more than one firewall.
DO NOT TURN OFF FIREWALLS; CONFIGURE THEM CORRECTLY.
B. For ease of organization, put all computers in the same Workgroup. This
is done from the System applet in Control Panel, Computer Name tab.
C. Create matching user accounts and passwords on all machines. You do not
need to be logged into the same account on all machines and the passwords
assigned to each user account can be different; the accounts/passwords just
need to exist and match on all machines. DO NOT NEGLECT TO CREATE
PASSWORDS, EVEN IF ONLY SIMPLE ONES. If you wish a machine to boot directly
to the Desktop (into one particular user's account) for convenience, you
can do this. The instructions at this link work for both XP and Vista:
Configure Windows to Automatically Login (MVP Ramesh) -
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/Autologon.htm
Malke